HAY-FEVER CURE IS NOW WITHIN SCIENTIFIC RANGE

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29714, 6 January 1962, Page 8

HAY-FEVER CURE IS NOW WITHIN SCIENTIFIC RANGE

[Specially written by WILLIAM CAVENDISH]

LONDON, December 25.

The scent of new-mown grass and hay, the perfume of a flower-bed by evening. Cuch things inspire poets to write lyrics. For most of us they help to make summer a pleasure.

But for a hapless minority the coming of the perfume season touches off a different reaction: it makes these people ill.

Bitter experience has taught them to expect nothing but misery, ami depressing illness for a large part of blossom-time.

They are sufferers from hay fever—the allergy which now claims victims bv the million in every part of the world. Every summer they stock up with supplies of handkerchiefs and favourite remedies, and settle down to a regime of closed doors and windows barred against the fresh summer

Peak suffering time varies with the country. In Britain, it begins in May and drags on until the early days of July. In Australia, with seasons reversed, November is a bad month. New Yorkers expect the worst in August and September. It is on record that, since the dawn of medicine, hay fever has been defying doctors to find a solution. The ancient war lords of China tried to avoid giving battle in the summer because a high proportion of their soldiers were hay fever victims.

Today it still causes a 50-year-old man in Finland to spend half his life sneezing. In the season he averages 2000 sneezes a day. Is there any end in sight to this age-old nuisance? Doctors and scientists, after years of painstaking research, think the answer could soon be “yes.” The direct cause of hay fever is known to be pollen, the seed dust of flowers and grasses. On a bad day, a pollen belt develops which stretches m a mile-high umbrella above the land mass. Chemical Accident It is invisible, and—to nine persons out of 10—quiteharmless. When a trace of pollen gets into the blood of normal people, it is promptly neutralised by an antibody But some folk suffer from an accident in chemical make-up. To them, breathing and naturally-scented air is pure poison. For them the antibody system has not worked properly, and a poison called histamine has formed. This causes the eyes to water, and the nose to stream. There is a constant sneezing, and all the symptoms of a never-ending cold Curiously. doctors have found that the main sufferers are not the open-air farmworkers, but the chair-borne brain workers in city offices Hay fever tends to run in families and, ■ for some reason, attacks two men to every one woman. Skin Tests Year-to-year preventions have been found possible, but they are long-drawn-out processes. First, the hay fever victim must undergo skin tests. From these tests, doctors can identify the exact pollen to which the patient is allergic. A system of desensitisation then begins. Repeated "cocktail" injections made up for offending pollens are given, starting with a minute dose and working* up over a period of weeks to larger doses. The process is a tedious one and may have to be started three months or more before the season begins. Courses of 20 or 30 injections are not uncommon. Too often, patients fail to seek advice until the attack has got under way. At this stage, not so long ago, it was too late. Victims had to look forward to the certainty of 10 weeks or so of tears and atishoos. Luckily, in recent years entirely new drugs—the antihistamines—have been developed which afford relief to many people. They neutralise the histamines which cause all the trouble. The only disadvantage is that they sometimes make people sleepy or slightly giddy. Doctors try to over-

ing the drug best suited to the system and recommending patients not to take them before driving a car. Meanwhile, the most fruitful hopes of wiping out for ever the curse of hay fever lie in investigations now being carried out in Britain with the co-operation of the Medical Research Council and the Animal Health Trust. Doctors know that histamine is usually present in small quantities in every human body. It becomes troublesome only when the amount goes over a certain level

Veterinary surgeons investieome the side effects by find-

gating diseases of racehorses for the Animal Health Trust made the important discovery that particular white blood cells played an active part in the control of histamines. Whenever these cells, known as eosinophil leucocytes, were present in the bloodstream the evil effects of histamine were automatically reduced. This suggested that injections of eosinophils might be used to combat histamine and so destroy the root cause of hay fever—along with certain other allergies. After more than a year of frustrating research, a technique was evolved of extracting eosinophils from the horse blood. A substance has emerged which ia more powerful than any anti-hista-mine drug yet manufactured. Veterinary surgeons are now studying with doctors the next steps of isolating, identifying, and finally synthetically producing this vital substance.

Cabinet Ministers, professors, musicians, and doctors themselves will be among the army of hay fever sufferers who would desperately like to see a lasting cure result from these experiments. But few would be more grateful than King Baudouin of Belgium, one of the unluckiest of all victims.

Yearly, in spite of all the pleas of royal aides, people continue to decorate houses and public places with flowers in his honour. For a hay fever victim, that is just about the last word in cruelty.—(Central Press Features. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.)